Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...production style less intimate than very small theater-in-the-round. In addition, it has virtually no plot. Playwrights Gregorio and Maria Martinez Sierra have merely chronicled two days eighteen years apart. In the first act, an unwanted infant girl is left on the doorstep of a convent of Dominican nuns, and the sisters decide to raise the child. In the second, the girl, now eighteen years old, is leaving the convent to get married. In terms of standard theatrical material, that's all there...
...used very few words from the dramatic alphabet, but with them they have managed to say a great many things about human nature. Indeed, the irrepressibility of human nature--of personality, of emotions, of love--seems to be the central theme of the play. The young girls in the convent have renounced worldly things, yet within the limits of monastic walls and rules their youthfulness and vitality burst forth in many ways--in girlish giggling, in writing poems, in squabbling with the other nuns. Most important, their maternal instincts awake immediately upon the arrival of the baby. The play does...
...simple a nun's life really can be. In no time the angel is in hot water with the mother superior for her angelic frankness. When Sister Angelica tells her to stop it, the angel complains: "Do you mean I cannot tell the truth in a convent?" No, says the sister. "Use mental reservation ... a gimmick invented by the Jesuits. Tell as much of the truth as you think advisable, and mentally reserve the rest...
...Convent life whirls on at a bewildeing pace and even the mother superior, in her show-stopping song, laments that she can barely keep up with it: "Oh, the very interior life of a Mother Superior/Is not so interior/It's veiled hysterier./The roofs need repairing/The budgets need paring/This pace is driving me wild./If I get to heaven it's because I made twenty-seven/First Fridays when I was a child...
...nest," puts up at Mangan's Hotel for some rest after a breakdown from overwork on the tribal customs of the Congo. All might have been well had Dr. Butler not written a feature article for the London press. Butler included a description of nuns from the Patrickstown convent jumping over fires on Midsummer Eve and made some unfortunate references to some of the rites of The Golden Bough in connection with these innocent goings...